This is an adapted excerpt from the Nov. 21 episode of “The ReidOut.”
On Thursday, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for attorney general, Matt Gaetz, announced he was withdrawing his name from consideration. “[I]t is clear that my confirmation was unfairly becoming a distraction to the critical work of the Trump/Vance Transition,” Gaetz wrote on X.
But let’s be clear, Gaetz didn’t drop out because he was a “distraction”; he dropped out because the votes weren’t there. The incoming administration couldn’t convince enough Republican senators to back Gaetz. This abrupt withdrawal is a hugely embarrassing moment for Trump. The president-elect thought he had a mandate to nominate whomever he wanted and push them through, no matter what skeletons were in their closet.
This is Trump’s first big failure since winning a second term, and it should be seen as such. It’s also a failure of Vice President-elect JD Vance, who personally lobbied his Republican colleagues in the Senate on behalf of Gaetz. Clearly, he failed to convince enough of them to come around.
The president-elect thought he had a mandate to nominate whomever he wanted and push them through, no matter what skeletons were in their closet.
Within hours of Gaetz’s withdrawal, Trump named longtime ally and former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi as his new pick to lead the Justice Department. Bondi started as a relatively Jeb Bush-type Republican. As Florida’s attorney general, she pursued the opioid crisis and led an unsuccessful challenge to the Affordable Care Act — bread-and-butter Republican issues. She’s not somebody with a penchant for pursuing enemies like Gaetz, so it would be interesting to see if she pushes back against Trump.
In 2017, Bondi was rumored to be in the running for a nomination as part of Trump’s first Cabinet but, at the time, they were not certain she would get confirmed because of a controversy surrounding a donation Trump made to her campaign in 2013 shortly before she declined to join a lawsuit against the now-defunct Trump University. Overall, I would say Bondi brings the basic qualifications that Gaetz did not. She certainly could be the administrator of the Justice Department. But, over the next few weeks, we’ll see how the politics, including that 2013 donation, play out. Allison Detzel contributed.
David Jolly
David Jolly, an MSNBC political contributor, represented Florida's 13th Congressional District as a Republican in the House from 2014 to 2017. He is the chairman of the Serve America Movement. Jolly left the Republican Party in 2018.
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